One aspect relates, in general, to network communications, and in particular, to the refreshing of address registration information used in communicating within a network.
Networks, such as Ethernet networks, maintain routing tables to facilitate routing of frames within the network. One example of a routing table is a Media Access Control (MAC) forwarding table that includes MAC addresses used in routing frames within the network. The size of this table varies depending on the size and cost of the physical switch. With the increase in size of Layer 2 Networks in customer data centers, due to the convergence of the 10/100 networks into the 1G/10G networks, the possibility of a MAC forwarding table becoming full has dramatically increased. To help keep the MAC forwarding tables filled with only “active” MAC entries, many switch vendors have adopted a five minute MAC timeout value. This means if a switch port does not receive a packet with a source MAC address which is currently active in the MAC forwarding table over the five minute interval, this MAC address is purged from the forwarding table.
Once the MAC address is purged from the forwarding table, all packets received with a destination MAC address, which is not present in the MAC forwarding table, is broadcast/forwarded to all switch ports associated with the port group. This can cause significant switch and network performance issues depending on the overall Local Area Network (LAN) utilization.